genitiveinflected

Genitiveinflected is a linguistic term used to describe word forms that are inflected to mark the genitive case. The genitive case expresses relationships such as possession, origin, material, or quantity, and is realized by inflections on nouns, pronouns, adjectives, or determiners in many languages. In languages with rich inflection, genitiveinflected forms may appear on the noun itself or on accompanying words.

In synthetic languages, the genitive is expressed through endings. For example, German uses forms like des Mannes or der Frau to signal possession; Russian employs genitive forms in various constructions, including after negation; Latin uses the genitive to denote possession and various other relations. Finnic languages also employ genitive endings, as in talon for “of the house.” In analytic languages, genitive relations are often shown by prepositions rather than inflection, though some contexts preserve genitive-inflected nouns from older stages of the language.

Key functions of genitiveinflected forms include indicating possession (the book of the student), material composition (a shirt of cotton), partitive inclusion (some of the water), and source or reference (the city’s outskirts). The term is mainly of interest in typology and historical linguistics, where researchers compare how different languages realize the genitive relationship and how genitive inflection patterns evolve over time.

See also: genitive case, inflection, grammatical case, possessive.